East Chicago man gets 10-year split term in 2018 shooting of woman

An East Chicago man got a 10-year split term Thursday in connection with a 2018 East Chicago shooting that left a bullet lodged in a woman’s spine.

Mark Harrison III, 29, was sentenced to seven years in prison and three years in Lake County Community Corrections work release. He has spent about two years incarcerated and would be credited for that time.

He pleaded guilty Oct. 31 to aggravated battery. His lawyer John Cantrell said he likely would not appeal.

Judge Natalie Bokota later noted the woman was an innocent party in the shooting.

The woman was left with a “heavy burden,” Deputy Prosecutor Lindsey Lanham said. She lived in fear that she could grow increasingly disabled down the line. She has trouble holding a baby without extreme pain.

She understood people make mistakes, but “32 rounds is not a mistake,” Lanham said.

Cantrell said jail had changed Harrison.

He “feels terrible about what happened,” he said.

Harrison apologized in court.

Three men, including Harrison, were originally charged in the case.

Co-defendant Larcel Lockhart’s lawyer Lakeisha Murdaugh said in November he would reject a plea offer. His trial is scheduled for March. Charges against Marzell Walden Jr. were dropped in 2018.

It was a “senseless,” “horrible,” “selfish act,” Bokota said. The woman had “nothing to do” with anything the boyfriend may have done and was left in “constant pain.”

Officers responded around 10 a.m. on April 1, 2018, to the 3400 block of Guthrie Street for a report of multiple shots fired, according to a probable cause affidavit.

A woman was sitting in a car with her boyfriend outside her apartment complex on Guthrie Street when they “heard a loud bang” and saw the “front passenger side window shatter,” followed by gunfire, the affidavit stated.

The woman said she had seen a man walk from one side of a building to another which she said she found “strange, because nobody lived on the side of the building where the man came from,” according to the affidavit.

The woman was shot in her upper right back and was taken to St. Catherine Hospital, court records state. She had spinal and rib fractures, causing “difficulty with her lower right extremities,” the affidavit stated.

At the scene, officers found 32 spent shell casings from two different caliber weapons, according to the affidavit.

Surveillance footage showed two men walking behind the apartments and “pulling out handguns and firing them at a vehicle” before returning to a vehicle that had dropped them off, the affidavit stated.

Lockhart had an ankle monitor on at the time that showed he was in the area of the shooting that day, according to the affidavit.

Post-Tribune archives contributed.

mcolias@post-trib.com